Dan Hodges is a former Labour Party and GMB trade union official, and has managed numerous independent political campaigns. He writes about Labour with tribal loyalty and without reservation. You can read Dan's recent work here

If Boko Haram don’t 'bring back our girls', what are we going to do about it?

If Boko Haram don’t bring back our girls, what are we going to do about it? I ask this question because yesterday I saw our Prime Minister do a very strange thing. During a break in his interview with Andrew Marr, he sat next to CNN’s chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour, and held up a bit of paper that asked the Islamist terror group to do just that. “Bring back our girls,” Her Majesty’s first minister demanded.

He’s not alone. Earlier in the week Michelle Obama, the wife of the most powerful man on the planet, stood in the White House and did the same thing. Having held up her sign, she then proceeded to deliver a radio address – unprecedented for a First Lady – in which she said: “In these girls, Barack and I see our own daughters.”

On one level, the reaction to the abduction by a radical Islamist terror group of 250 schoolgirls is uplifting. It has been spontaneous. It has been global. It has been driven by ordinary people, and taken up by their elected representatives. The world has said “we will not let this stand”.

Or has it? Two hundred and fifty girls have been snatched from their families. And save for getting some very prominent people to wave handwritten signs, what have we actually done? What do we want done?

Presumably, one of the things we want is for Boko Haram to do what they’re being asked to do, which is bring the girls back. Fine. But precisely when did we start negotiating with terrorists for the release of their kidnap victims? When did we start doing it publicly? And who decided to commission the Prime Minister and the First Lady of the United States to act as informal hostage negotiators?

Boko Haram have secured the attention of the world. They have secured the personal attention of President Obama’s wife. What lesson are they likely to draw from that? What lesson are other terrorist organisations likely to draw from that?

Of course, it may be that the current campaign is directed as much at the Nigerian government as the kidnappers themselves. But Nigeria is a sovereign African state. And I thought the conventional wisdom was that when western powers like Britain and the US throw our diplomatic weight around like this, it’s counterproductive. It smacks of the old imperialism. That’s certainly the rationale deployed whenever anyone recommends doing anything about Mugabe.

But OK, we’ve decided “something must be done”. So I repeat, what happens if nothing is done? What then? Do we put up more signs. Bigger signs. Get more high-profile advocates. A fundraiser. A pop concert perhaps. Get “Bring back our girls” to number one.

Or should we actually go and get our girls. Send some big, rough men, with very big guns to say to Boko Haram: “We’ve come to take our girls back. And if you try to stop us, it’s the last thing you’ll ever do.”

Personally, I’m up for that. And I suspect if the world woke up tomorrow to discover we’d done precisely that, the world would cheer. The concerns about foreign adventurism, about putting “our boys” in harms way, would be set aside if “our girls” were reunited with their families.

But then what happens next week? When Boko Haram snatch another 250 girls. Or what happens if the girls aren’t snatched from a village in Nigeria. But a village in Syria. Or Afghanistan. What happens if groups of masked thugs start snatching schoolgirls in Ukraine?

I understand the flaws in the “because we can’t do everything, we shouldn’t do anything” argument. But I just want to know what the rules are.

Boko Haram have been active for a decade. They were formally classified as a terrorist organisation in 2013. They have been responsible for 10,000 deaths. And to date no one has argued we should lift a finger against them.

Do we want to be the world’s policeman, or do we not? If we don’t, then fine. But let’s take down the signs, and the hashtags, because all we’re doing is communicating our own impotence.

Equally, if we do want to be the world’s policeman, then we have to do the job properly. We cannot say to a Nigerian mother and father today “your girl is our girl” and then tomorrow say to them “sorry, that was last week. Your girl isn’t our girl any more”. Nor can we say it the Syrian mother and father, or the Afghan mother and father, or the Ukranian mother and father.

On Saturday I watched the Eurovision song contest. Whenever the Russian entry got a point, they were booed. Is this really the new progressive interventionism? We’ll let them annex your country. But don’t worry, we’ll boo their Eurovision entry instead.

By all means lets call on Boko Haram to bring back our girls. But if they don’t, can we please go and get them.